NDP, Tories tied in provincewide voter support: poll By: Kevin Rollason Posted: 4:42 PM CDT Tuesday, Jun. 20, 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/06/2023 (809 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Both the mercury and the fortunes of Progressive Conservatives are rising in Manitoba.

After being mired in second place in polls for 2 1/2 years, the Stefanson government has pulled into a reported dead heat with the NDP, with an October election looming.

For the first time since the NDP took over top spot for provincial party support in December 2020 — amid a COVID-19 pandemic wave in which hundreds of Manitobans died and doctors urged the province to impose lockdowns — a recent Free Press-Probe Research Inc. poll shows the governing Tories and official Opposition tied at 41 per cent.

In seat-rich Winnipeg, the NDP has dropped to 48 per cent voter support, while the Tories have risen to 32 per cent — the closest gap since December 2020.

The NDP were polling at 55 per cent as recently as December.

Christopher Adams, a political science professor at the University of Manitoba, said the rise in Tory fortunes is no longer a blip — it’s a trend.

“It’s quite startling they have evened-up provincewide,” Adams said of the May 31-June 13 poll results.

“We were reasoning in March if a three-point jump was statistical noise or something showing the dial is moving and, clearly, we can see the dial is moving.”

Tory public criticism of NDP Leader Wab Kinew is working, Adams said, and there have been months of spending announcements in various areas including health care.

“The PCs have been doing this for 12 months now, and it is having an effect,” he said. “The priorities of this government are different than the (premier Brian) Pallister government. The spending now would never have been done by Pallister.

“And I think the premier has not been making the same mistakes in public she was earlier,” he added, referring to an incident when Premier Heather Stefanson boasted about her son’s hockey team’s win when asked a question by the NDP about the failed attempt to transfer a COVID-19 patient to an Ontario hospital before she died.

The last time the Tories led such a voter support poll was September 2020, when the Pallister government was riding high at 43 per cent, compared to the NDP’s 34 per cent.

At that point, even though the world had been facing COVID-19 since March, only 20 Manitobans had officially died from the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

As COVID numbers rose, and 200 doctors signed a letter in early November asking the province to lockdown public gatherings, the Pallister government initially hesitated.

By the end of the year, hospital wards and intensive care units were full and 661 Manitobans had died, many who were seniors in personal care homes.

Probe president Scott MacKay said he believes the Tories’ rising polling numbers are not an illusion.

“The numbers between December last year, and then March, were showing a narrowing (NDP lead). It had moved to six points from 11, but we didn’t know if it was a trend or not,” MacKay said this week.

“It appears it is a trend, because the numbers have moved even further.”

However, Manitoba elections are won or lost depending which way Winnipeg voters cast their ballots, because the capital city accounts for 32 of the 57 ridings up for grabs, he added.

“With 16 points separating the parties in the city, I don’t think 41 per cent (across the province) is enough for the Tories to win an election,” he said. “The Tories have such overkill in rural ridings.”

Noting the next voter support poll will be released in September, MacKay noted: “This report is the last of the ‘phony wars.’ The next one will be after the writ has dropped.”

Other poll findings include:

• 54 per cent of rural voters plan to vote for a PC candidate, while three in 10 say they will vote NDP;

• Men and women continue to support different parties: half of women support the NDP (32 per cent for men), while half of men support the PCs (32 per cent of women);

• 75 per cent of voters who cast a ballot for Pallister’s Tories say they will again vote for the PCs, but more than one in 10 are still undecided;

• 83 per cent who voted NDP in the last election (2019) will do so again, while only 40 per cent of Liberal voters in 2019 now support them, with most of the others deciding to park their votes with the NDP this time around;

• Tory support is higher among older Manitobans, as well as those with lower levels of formal education or higher incomes;

• One in five Manitobans says they are undecided, a jump up from 17 per cent in March.

Meanwhile, “the Liberals are not going anywhere in this poll,” Adams said. “It looks like the NDP are picking up people who claim to have voted Liberal in the last election.”

The poll of 1,000 adults in Manitoba was conducted between May 31 and June 13, and is considered accurate plus or minus 3.1 per cent, 95 per cent of the time.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca